When the Moon was Ours(52)
She grabbed his belt and the waist of his jeans and pulled them away from his body enough to get her hand in. First her fingers were grasping at his boxers, feeling him through the thin cotton. Then her hand crawled up to the elastic band and found its way in, and she took hold of him, hard, like there was a single shape of him to be grabbed. She put her hand on him as though he had a body that would let him be called he and him without anyone ever daring to question it.
He didn’t pack, didn’t stuff a pair of socks into his underwear. Didn’t fill a condom with dry grain or hair gel or any of the other ridiculous ideas they’d considered before he figured out that working on the Bonners’ farm could get him out of PE, out of changing in a locker room. And that was something she loved about him, the fearlessness, how he simply wore jeans loose enough that no one would ask questions.
For one pinching moment, Miel wondered if that was what had made the Bonner girls suspect, if they’d looked at him close enough, seen how the shape of him did or didn’t push up against the crotch of his pants.
But she wasn’t letting them in, not this time. She was shutting every window in this house and scaring them off with the light from Sam’s moons. It was just him, and her, his fingers flicking against her like the hot light of falling stars, her touching him in the best way she knew to remind him there was no distance, no contradiction between the body he had and a boy called Samir.
lake of joy
The first thing Aracely must have wondered, seeing Miel in the doorway, was why her hair was wet from the shower. Why she smelled not like her own soap, but like the kind Sam used. Why she was wearing not her own clothes, but one of Sam’s flannel shirts over a pair of his cuffed-up jeans, the hems damp because even if they were his, they were on her body.
But before Aracely could ask about any of that, Miel spoke.
“I want a pumpkin,” she said.
Aracely set down the glass jar she was refilling with dried rosebuds. “What?” she asked.
“I want us to carve pumpkins,” Miel said. “You and me.”
They would go to a farm other than the Bonners’—any farm but the Bonners’—and they would walk through the rows of curling vines. They would pass Rouge Vif d’Etampes, and yellow-and-green-striped carnival pumpkins, and the round, orange kind called a jack-o’-lantern because it was a favorite to hollow out and fill with candles.
Aracely would bring knives for both of them, and they would cut shallow ones to leave on their doorsteps, maybe an Autumn Crown pumpkin or the pale blue-green kind named Shamrock.
And they would bring home others wide and round enough to carve. They would sit at the kitchen table, newspaper spread over the wood, and they would hollow them out. They would set the seeds in the oven, drying out the pepitas and then sprinkling them with salt and chili powder.
Miel would not think of her mother, frantic and clawing the flesh out of a pumpkin big enough to hold Miel. She would blot out that memory with the yellow of the kitchen table, and the shades of the pumpkin rinds, and the smell of dark sugar in the air as she and Aracely passed each other spoons of sage and fireweed honey.
There would be no glass pumpkins. Everything would be damp and warm and alive. Miel and Aracely would paint their lips to go out, and while Aracely touched up the edges of Miel’s color, she would remind her that the achiote Miel loved for its earth and pepper and flower taste came from a plant called a lipstick tree.
Aracely was still staring.
“For the lighting,” Miel said. They would use the smallest blades in the knife drawer to carve patterns in their pumpkins. Then they’d set candles inside, and they would bring them to the river. The water would carry them alongside all the other pumpkins the rest of the town had brought, all those carved, floating lanterns.
Aracely’s laugh was not unkind, but disbelieving. “You want to carve pumpkins for the lighting?”
Miel still tensed with the thought of holding the cool shell of a pumpkin. But she didn’t want to live fearing the way they swelled and grew on the vine, never falling, just settling into the earth. She wanted to find the beauty in the cream Luminas, and the blue-gray Jarrahdales, and the deep-ribbed Cinderella pumpkins that looked as soft as the throw pillows on Aracely’s bed.
She didn’t want to fear anything. She wanted to be as fearless and generous as the woman who stood in this indigo room, for her laugh to be like Aracely’s, both reckless and kind.
“Yeah,” Miel said. “Can we go buy some?”
Aracely shut the wooden cabinet. “I’ll get my coat.”
small sea
He was already fake-tutoring Peyton. Mr. and Mrs. Bonner trusted him with so little reserve they had no idea how bad he was at math, or that he and Peyton had never even opened a book together.
Sam had first offered to help Lian with her reading when they went to school together. Every time he caught her in the hall when no one else was there, he told her that he or Miel would go over the English and history assignments with her. Miel probably wouldn’t have been so happy about him volunteering her, but Lian was so used to her sisters’ company he couldn’t help wondering if she’d say yes to help from another girl.
The first time he’d asked, Lian had been polite, the way she always was. “What are you talking about?” she’d asked, her smile still in place. A little shake of her head.